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After years of focusing on further improving KDE4 two weeks ago the developers of the free desktop announced the next big step for their project: KDE Frameworks 5.0. But as long-time developer — and Plasma team leader — Aaron Seigo points out the source-incompatible changes shall be held to a minimum. Also calls Frameworks 5.0 only the "first step", new Applications and Workspace releases are to follow later, Seigo goes on to talk about the chances in the mobile market with Plasma Active and further areas of collaboration with the other big free desktop: GNOME.

No one is better qualified to talk about the state of the KDE desktop than Aaron Seigo. A former member of the board of KDE e.V, the German non-profit that oversees the project, Seigo is a lead developer on the desktop. Last weekend, I interviewed him at the Calgary Open Source Systems Festival, COSSFest, in front of an audience, on where KDE is today and where it is heading.

Aaron Seigo is one of the most public faces of the KDE desktop. Not only is he a long-time developer, but, for the past three years, he has been president of KDE e.V., the German non-profit that handles the project's financial and legal affairs.

Aaron Seigo is one of the most public faces of the KDE desktop. Not only is he a long-time developer, but, for the past three years, he has been president of KDE e.V.. Now nearing the end of his time as president, he talked about KDE's recent past and near future, and his role in both.

With the recent release of version 4.0, the KDE open source project has garnered a lot of international attention. One of KDE's lead developers, and best known personality, Aaron J Seigo is in Australia to speak at this year's Linux.conf.au on his vision for better desktop computing. Computerworld spoke with Seigo, a native of Calgary, Canada, about his view of the world and how a little bit of innovation will permanently change how people interact with software.

Aaron Seigo joined the KDE project in 2000 and is sponsored by Trolltech. Based in Calgary, Canada Aaron spends his time thinking about KDE project and its client-side software. Here he describes how porting KDE4 to Windows and MacOS will enable Kontact, the Open Source groupware application, to challenge the dominance of Microsoft Outlook in the enterprise.

Aaron Seigo has published a list of changes and new features to Plasma, the desktop shell for KDE4, that will be included in KDE4.3. This list is quite long, so I will only try to show the most important changes.

In about 6 weeks the biggest yearly gathering of the KDE community starts in Tampere. To give you all a little taste of Akademy 2010, Guillermo Amaral interviewed Aaron Seigo and asked him about his keynote.

Aaron J. Seigo presents new graphical effects for KDE 4 desktop Plasma. He shows fade-in and fade-out effects on icons. Aaron also talks about how easy these animations can be implemented by using the Phase/Animator framework. It also makes animations consistent across the desktop and makes them easy to change.

During the Plasma development Aaron Seigo mentioned that the final version of Plasma will allow it to the user to drag&drop Plasmoids between the “task bar” and the desktop. While the coding style for such applets was already available the actual implementation was still missing in Plasma’s task bar.